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Saturday, July 25, 2009

New York’s Museum of Modern Art has a piece called Measuring the Universe by Roman Ondák. It is a hands-on experience in data visualization. Per the MOMA’s description:

Viewers play a vital role in the creation of Measuring the Universe (2007), by Slovakian artist Roman Ondák (b. 1966). Over the course of the exhibition, attendants mark Museum visitors’ heights, first names, and date of the measurement on the gallery walls. Beginning as an empty white space, over time the gallery gradually accumulates the traces of thousands of people.

Below is a photo from Flickr user profzucker that captures the environment well.

There is a dense band of names between and around the average heights of men and women. Above and below, the presence of names gets progressively sparser. At almost 6’2“, I was at the top edge of the dense part.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

I like Italian food, but most cities seem to have an oversupply of Italian restaurants compared to other types of ethnic food (as defined relative to the U.S. food market).

To test this perception, I analyzed OpenTable’s categorized listings of restaurants for Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. Italian was the top ethnic category by far, comprising nearly 18% of listed restaurants. A distant second was French at 6.6%. Next was Japanese at 3%. Mexican, Indian, and Thai were each farther down the list, below 2%.

Which begs the question: Does the populace really want three or six or ten Italian restaurants for every French, Japanese, or Indian restaurant, respectively?

Some caveats about the data:

I ignored the American categories due to their home-team advantage in the United States.

The categories are not cleanly separated. For example, Japanese and Sushi are distinct categories, but apparently a restaurant can only be in one category. So we might safely say that the 3% figure for Japanese is actually 4.4% when we add the Sushi restaurants. Similarly, French could pick up an incremental 1.1% if combined with Contemporary French.

OpenTable is a service for restaurant reservations, so it lists higher-end restaurants. That explains the low numbers for a category like Chinese, which has a lot of casual and take-out restaurants.

These and other factors undoubtedly messed with the numbers. But unless the data was totally whacked, the magnitude of the differences between Italian and the other categories seems large enough to point to something real.